One present commercially implemented EAS system has a transmitter which radiates a pulsed magnetic field into a surveillance area wherein it is desired to note the presence of articles bearing EAS tags. When a tagged article is present in the surveillance area, its tag is excited by the radiated magnetic field and, based on its composition, is caused to generate a detectable response signal. A receiver, which is enabled between successively spaced transmitter field radiations, detects the response signal of the tag and initiates an alarm or other activity to indicate the presence of the tag in the surveillance area.
A transmitter suited for use in the described EAS system is shown in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,239,696 (the '696 patent), to which incorporating reference is hereby made.
Many EAS systems use so-called "transceiver" antennas, wherein the transmitter and receiver coils are in very close proximity. In pulsed EAS systems employing transceiver antennas, current flowing in the transmitting antenna coil induces a secondary current in the closely coupled receiver antenna coil. For practical reasons, the receiver antenna coils typically has many more turns than the transmitter coil, so there is a step-up transformer at hand. To produce peak transmitter currents of ten amps requires several hundred volts to be developed across the transmitter coil. The transformer relationship between antennas means potentials of two thousand volts or more could be induced across the receiver antenna coils. This could lead to voltage breakdown between the windings of the receiver coil, as well as damage to the sensitive receiver circuit input.
A common technique for protecting both the receiver coil itself and the receiver circuitry is to connect two semiconductor diodes in an anti-parallel arrangement across the receiver coil, i.e., the diodes are oppositely polarized. During active transmission times, whenever the voltage induced in the receiver coil exceeds the forward conduction voltage of one of the diodes, the diode conducts, limiting the maximum terminal voltage across the receiver to approximately two volts peak-to-peak.
Since the terminal voltage across the receiver coil is limited, a heavy induced current circulates in the receiver coil and through the diode junctions. The current flowing in the receiver coil generates a radiated magnetic field that contains harmonic distortion caused by the nonlinear conduction characteristic of the protection diodes.
Given the transformer relation between the transmitting coil and the receiving coil, the transmitting coil is of course subject to the receiver coil radiated magnetic field. The transmitter radiated field thus undesirably contains such diode-caused harmonic distortion and system transmissions are of lesser quality than is desired.